I’ll admit it – I’m exasperated.
I’m absurdly lucky to run a music business. At least, I
think it’s a music business. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, because my job – like
most jobs – is rarely about what I tell people it’s about. If my job is
recording and performing music, why did I spend three hours this week on the
phone with a credit-card processing firm, two more discussing rates and
coverage with my insurance agent, and countless more adjusting web pages and
updating blogs? A lot of that stuff is fun, but some of it’s just dull – and
none of it compares to actually banging out a song on the piano.
But it’s all part of the process.
If you’re chasing your passion – whether it’s music or
something else – you’ve probably had the same experience. We don’t shape our
dreams into reality without a few rude awakenings. Want to create great music
and share it with others? Then you’ll need a website, a press photo, a
designer, a tech rider, a network of venues and musicians, duplication,
distribution and a marketing plan. There are a whole lot of non-dreamy things
to do.
Of course, part of what I hope we’re doing at Backthird
Audio is building infrastructure that will allow more local music-lovers to do
music without necessarily writing their own business plan first. But what I’m
talking about here is bigger even than the need for structure and for
differently-gifted people working together to make a project happen. I’m talking
about a basic rule of life: Whatever it is that’s most important to you, you’ll
always find a million other things to do instead. Some of those things are
genuinely helpful. Some are just distractions. And it’s up to you to sort out
which is which.
Technology only seems to be making things worse. Take e-mail,
for example. E-mail is the only communication method in which it takes more
time and energy to receive messages than it does to send them. Because it’s so
easy to send e-mail, your inbox is doubtless cluttered with sappy forwards and
clever newsletters (Thanks for reading mine! I love you! Let’s do lunch!). Each
of these took only seconds to send, but it takes you far longer every day to
sort through the deluge and decide what matters and what doesn’t.
I can think of lots of philosophical reasons for why the
world works this way. But what I want to know is, what are you doing about it?
What means have you found to keep yourself focused on the things that matter
and not on the ones that don’t? How can you tell the difference? What do you do
to minimize distraction and move toward your dreams?
